The exhibition TRANS SEXUAL EXPRESS BARCELONA
2001: A CLASSIC FOR THE THIRD
MILLENNIUM addresses changes in sex, sexuality and gender policies
and the reinvention of affectionate relationships. The title of
the exhibition is a play on the idea of mobility, in which the experience
of living and the formation of identity are conceptualised as a
continual transit, as a constant becoming. The subtitle is a wry
allusion to a canon re-invented from new aesthetic and ideological
standpoints.

TRANS SEXUAL EXPRESS aims to go further than the
numerous body-centred exhibitions held in the nineties. Here, the
body is a veritable battleground, criss-crossed by sex, sexuality,
gender, race and class, the global and the local, past and future,
centre and periphery. In TSE, subjectivity and the search for equality
and solidarity are woven into a biting reflection on the social
mores that serve to pigeonhole identities, and in praise of openness
to diversity and polymorphism. It is in this connection that we
aim to promote difference through a search for equality. To this
end, our guest artists from various parts of the world will attempt
to show how sex, sexuality and gender issues are linked to ideologies
spawned by policies of exclusion designed to maintain the hegemony
of some people over others.

TSE focus on the social art formulated by the new
sexual, racial and class radicals who question the role models imposed
by mass culture, as much as they do the disturbing breakthroughs
in biotechnology, while simultaneously developing a polymorphous
capacity for re-inventing the human body. TSEB 2001 concerns itself
with breaking down the barriers set up by the hierarchical divisions
betwen various art disciplines, and with globalisation as the cornerstone
of the neoliberal doctrine that seeks to do away with differences
through galloping standardisation. In short, TSEB 2001 is billed
to be a trans-generational, transexual and transnational exhibition.

The location of the exhibition venue, the Centre
d'Art Santa Monica, at the lower end of the Ramblas and near the
harbour of Barcelona, lends added value to the exhibition, as the
harbour is itself a metaphor for the circulation of products, and
because a large number of bars frequented by female, male and transvestites
prostitutes and their customers happen to be in the area. Moreover,
the proximity of local brothels endorses the artistic exploration
of sexual exchanges, and of the yearnings, phantoms and relationships
of submission and power running through them. The fact that some
of these locales are included as exhibition satellites renders the
Centre d'Art Santa Monica walls porous, setting up a flow connecting
both inner to outer, and reality to its representation.

After the show in Barcelona, TRANS SEXUAL EXPRESS
is touring to Kunsthalle Mucsarnok (Budapest, Hungary) and to Kiosko
Alfonso (A Coruña, Spain).